ANCHORAGE — A few miles and a few days from this weekend’s start of the Iditarod sled dog race, a glaciologist named Shad O’Neel stood in his sun-drenched office at the United States Geological Survey, talking about climate change.

The walls displayed striking before-and-after photographs of the Columbia Glacier and others in Alaska. Even a nonscientist could see that they were shrinking, sometimes radically so in a decade or less.

O’Neel pulled out a color-coded map of mountain ranges in the southern part of the state, including the Alaska Range, through which 52 sled dog teams race north along the Iditarod trail on their 1,000-mile trek to Nome. Most ranges were deep shades of red, meaning the glaciers there had lost enormous quantities of mass, measured in enormous-sounding units like gigatons.

…………Rivers and creeks, used as frozen highways for sleds, are not reliably freezing as expected. Brush grows where it never used to, clogging old routes. Freakish storms, including midwinter rain, and sea-ice breakups increasingly wreak havoc on their sport and livelihood.

What used to be a given in Alaska — enough snow and ice to run the Iditarod and a slew of other sled dog races without much worry — is now fraught with perennial uncertainty.

The cosmic question is how long races like the Iditarod in places like Alaska can keep finding long, continuous threads of snow and ice in a region warming more quickly than most places on the planet.

—excerpt The Mush in the Iditarod May Soon Be Melted Snow by John Branch, NY Times, March 1, 2019

I read the above excerpted article from the sports section of the Sunday NY Times.  I subscribe only to the Sunday edition, which I read into the following week.  The range of subjects covered and the quality of writing make the Times a continuing education.

I am least likely to read from the sports section.  However this sports story caught my interest.  I read and felt a sense of alarm.  Alaska, the knife-cold North, is center stage with respect to climate change.

The issue is no more and no less than, the thinking, the way which we frame all of our thinking about Nature.  Nature becomes a reserve of resources: energy, materials for manufacturing products, animal and vegetable life for consumption as food, etc.  This mode of thinking, the entire earth as subject to our ordering….. Nature held in reserve. Technique is a ordering contrived by mathematical thinking, to the end that everything has a place in the cause and effect chain.  Everything (including man) is conceived within this enframement of Nature.  This manner of thinking becomes/is imperious, a destiny.

Reading further in Martin Heidegger’s essay The Question Concerning Technology are these striking lines.

Thus where everything that presences
exhibits itself in the light of cause-effect coherence,
even God,
for representational thinking,
can lose all that is exalted and holy,
the mysteriousness of his distance.
In the light of causality,
God can sink to the level of a cause,
of causa efficiens.

…..in a similar way
[when] nature presents itself
as a calculable complex of the effects of forces,
this indeed can permit correct determinations,
but precisely though these successes
the danger may remain
that in the midst of all that is correct
the truth will withdraw.
……this is not just any danger,
but the danger.

—excerpt, The Question Concerning Technology p. 131